Marketing with Purpose

First of all, I'm very grateful to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Professionally, I identify as a social entrepreneur. I've been working in the field of online marketing for over a decade, as a consultant, and now for many years as a collective of contractors that are niched particularly in inbound marketing. We're at the service of companies in the conscious business sphere, so most of our clients fall within the industries of education, health, environment, entrepreneurship and culture. If you've heard of the B Corp movement: we're trying to take more space online with the changemakers, and also give them more room in our economy.

At the base, it is a mission to shift paradigms, so it's perfectly suited for this conversation and this podcast. There's a lot of change that I felt our world needed, and the best way that I felt I could use my time towards that change was to dilute the media with positive, true, authentic content, and dilute our economy with social, local businesses that are using business as a force for good to solve needs and problems, and are not just focused on profit.

Yes. I would say I'm in this field due to what I feel is the necessary work that I can contribute to at the moment. It wasn't really a thought of, wow, everything's so great, what do I want to do here? I'm following my heart, absolutely, but following what I feel I can contribute, like a mission that I feel connected to.

I was in business school for long periods of time, college, university. I was about to graduate, and I really didn't want to enter the corporate box and the machine that was around me, particularly in a business school, as the direct path ahead of me. I did an exchange and studied and lived in Australia for a semester. On the side, to keep myself fulfilled and happy, I was deeply involved in hobbies in the alternative health sphere: yoga, plant-based nutrition, meditation, and also arts. I was working as a makeup artist part time during school, and I was singing in a band.

In Australia, where I was staying in Melbourne, they had this street and this whole community that was living full time off the arts. The arts were very supported. They had the industry for it, so it was, let's say, entertainment, but also corporate recordings. A whole entire community of people living really well off of this.

And at one point, in reflection on the trip, I was at a music festival, took some space and was just really thinking about how we could feel here: we do have the opportunity to do what we want to do. We are here to be ourselves. There is space for us to tap into what we feel is needed and then follow that.

I also love to travel, so location independence was something I wanted to maintain, not having to start over every time I went somewhere new. And I was really facing the reality of being a woman about to go into the corporate world, having the potential to bring children into this life. I was really struck by how I would answer the question of why I brought them here. How would I tell them about our governments being corrupt, and our systems not being optimal or reliable? How would I address the fact that our environment isn't secure, and our future therefore isn't either?

So I was really motivated to go into this, in order to make a change that I felt the world needed, to be more confident about bringing more people into it, and that would make me more proud to share what we've done with it and where we were at.

Oh boy. This was in 2004, so a long time ago.

Exactly. I started in the arts, because I had been in the music industry at that moment. There were a lot of people around me who were wondering how we were getting people to our shows, how we were successfully putting on these events. So I started a company with a friend who was in the band with me, while we were still in university, to help people in the arts put together shows, fundraisers, flyers, promotion, PR. I registered the business at that time.

And then upon graduation, early on, after working shortly with the family business that I have in the environment sector, I got recruited to the music industry. This was actually the time that Napster hit. That's when music became free, and their product got deemed valueless, at least for the music sharing component.

My client had 12 record labels, and with them really not knowing how to handle this, what to do, where to go, I eventually recommended that they go direct to their consumer base with content and newsletters, really tap into their fan base, build direct relationships, and sell their own catalogs. So they were my first client, and they hired me to build an e-commerce platform for their own music. Even if eventually iTunes deemed a song worth 99 cents, that's fine, but sell it yourself. Go direct. The more independent movement is what I felt was best, and that is what followed in that industry.

I've got to say, it was such a wonderful case study. It was an incredible learning to begin my career in online marketing in the music industry at that time.

I had never really made that connection, but it's a wise one, and it is valid. Even though so much is changing online all the time, I get that question a lot: how do you keep up? Diving into online marketing at that time, things changed, but not really. The biggest change was in SEO, when Penguin came out and made quality more valuable than quantity. And that is still where we're shifting.

That's where my instincts were, even at the time: the idea to go direct, to own your relationships, to be connected directly to your clients. That is still the message that I'm sharing, especially now, when we are all online based. This is more relevant than ever. We don't want to put all our eggs in a basket that we're not in control of, that we don't own, or that isn't building value for our brand or our assets as an entrepreneur or a business.

So the way that I approached online marketing at the time ended up being called inbound marketing, which is the marketing that you really own as a company. It's the organic strategies to connect with leads and build community, and those strategies end up building value in your brand, your company, your assets, your content. And I really think that now, more than ever, it shows us that yes, online is important, but we don't want to just rely on, let's say, social media, which tomorrow could shut down or start charging, and which already puts a lot of limits on and is in control of what you see when, and who you connect with.

So my line that I tell people is: those are Facebook's friends. They're not your friends until you have their email address. They're not your friends until you have their phone number, until you're in direct contact with them.

The way that I teach online marketing combines the inbound marketing method with web design and content marketing. And it reinforces that there are three phases of what we're dealing with: strategic management; reputation management, which is where SEO and social media fall, and that's huge; and relationship management, which happens with email marketing directly to your contacts, your database, and through the website that hopefully you own and that represents the value of your brand.

Yeah. The key word in that system and in these conversations is relationships. I believe we're now ready to put at the forefront the fact that relationships are the currency in business. It's really the currency. As a marketer, at least, I've realized it is my job to attract, build and maintain long-term relationships for clients. And that brings up the word human: this is a human story.

I also have a lot of gratitude for my background in yoga and meditation and nutrition, and wellness and health in general, which serves me constantly in this process as well, especially in crisis, then and now. Having my personal practices rooted in those techniques, which help with emotional regulation and stress management, allows me to meet these clients in these vulnerable areas. Even if it's not a crisis time, it's difficult to promote yourself. It's difficult to talk about yourself. You can do that for other people, but we can't be the observer and the observed at the same time. So it's very difficult to tell your own story, and you need someone to do that for you. And that's a vulnerable place, and an intimate place.

So at the end of the day, regardless of the technology that we're using and how far it goes, we're human beings behind it. Every click, every purchase, every relationship that's being built: there's a human on the other side of that click. What I'm getting to speak about more and more, which is a sign of it being something that we're more and more ready for, and more and more relevant for our times, especially again now, given this crisis, is our humanity. The fact that we are energetic, emotional, sentient beings, and that behind the numbers that you value in your business, behind your strategies, are people with feelings and human realities that I think we need to honor and connect to, and ideally add value to.

That's a good question. Okay. Well, I'd say our discussion even kind of reinforced that. That's sort of always been the path I've been on, from my initial thought that things need to change, coming from the perspective of business and specialized in marketing.

I kind of see that we're still in our barter system. It's just times 7 billion plus people now. We have a medium of exchange between us, money, but we're still in an exchange system. And in order to exchange, it comes down to the ability to communicate what you have available to exchange, and then the ability to actually exchange it, to have that transaction. Right now, that's online for us. And especially in this crisis, it's literally all we've got.

I was grateful that I entered this field at the time that the internet was becoming so accessible and becoming a marketplace for us. And it was one that was already shifting a paradigm for communications, let's say globally. Right now everyone's online, and we haven't had that kind of marketing power, or even communication power, since pre-television, when everyone was just listening to the radio and you had a hundred percent of everyone in one place. The internet presented that in terms of marketing and communication. It was the first global communication tool that we had that wasn't built for advertisement. It wasn't obliged to be a one-way propaganda vehicle. So the internet itself was a paradigm shift for mass communication and marketing.

And then within the internet, what I'm specialized in, the concept of inbound marketing, these organic marketing and communication methods, was a paradigm shift as well. Because everyone hit the internet the same way they knew how to use the other promotion tools: just sell advertising, one way, me, me, me, blah, blah, blah. We have the opportunity to have two-way communication now, connected conversations. So inbound marketing in and of itself represents a paradigm shift within online marketing. And I think it's a term people are more used to now.

And even social business as a concept was a paradigm shift, to say: hey, business shouldn't just be about profit. Let's look at the planet. Let's look at people. Let's look at purpose. Business should be solving a problem, and if you're not solving a problem with your business, then what are you doing? These were the subjects I was rallying around at the beginning, feeling that that's where we needed to go in our barter system: to know that social business, conscious business, is an option and an industry in and of itself, competing with the death and dying industry that we've all been built up on. There is a life and living industry, and that's represented through these B Corps, through these social businesses.

And then there's that personal reflection of how I want to live. If I were to bring a human here, I would want to be able to be home with them or travel with them. And even if not, with the people in my life that I want to see one day, I never felt that it made sense, or that it was healthy, to be stuck in this nine-to-five box of going in and checking out. It just felt so robotic and not human. So lifestyle is the word that comes up for me as always being at the root of my goals. It was motivated by my own lifestyle, but it represents a lifestyle in corporate culture that I feel we needed to shift to. And that's a paradigm shift of how we work.

Commetta, the organization that I run, is a collective of contractors that all basically put those values first. Our lifestyle, our health, the quality of our life comes first. We're human beings first. By honoring that, taking care of each other that way, supporting each other and reminding each other that that's the opportunity we have right now together, it really allows our work to be more impactful and higher quality, and truly valuable, because it's so pure and positive and very, very intentional. So the way that I'm running the business, the business that I'm building, the behind-the-scenes collective component to it, represents a new way of working for contractors.

I've always felt in this barter system that it was risky to put all your eggs in one basket: the idea of being an employee and banking on a big company to pay your pension and let you retire. We've been seeing for a long time that that's not reliable. And now in this crisis, my God, did that just show up to say: hey, look, these big companies are the first ones to break down and shove you aside. It's the smaller businesses that are representing the stories of hope and the resilience that's needed to be able to adapt. And entrepreneurship is the game of resilience. It's a leap of faith every day. I define it as faith.

So there is a paradigm shift in the way that I'm running this company, and in the lifestyle that I think it represents, for contractors particularly. Honestly, I think everyone should look at themselves as an independent professional. They're either lending their name and their talent and their energy to a pre-existing organization that hopefully they align with, or they're going to go on their own with it. But either way, it's really important that we all know our value: what we're worth on an open market, and maybe what we're worth to that company, and that we know what our skills are, so that if we are in a position where we need to use them independently, we're confident enough to do that.

However, in marketing, and that's sort of why I went into it: yes, I could make a lot more money than I've made, easily, because there aren't too many people specialized in online marketing. It's hard to catch up. They still can't really teach it so well. But that wasn't going to change anything. I wanted to help the people who were ready to build conscious businesses, to contribute to a conscious economy, to go against the grain, against the norm. They were wonderful. I met a lot of them in the arts and in health, but they had no idea how to promote or organize themselves. They would never afford a huge marketing agency like the larger companies use, which are just big boxes again, upselling and overheading, and still not really understanding what they're doing or necessarily getting the best results.

That would be considered my competition right now. Or the competition is these platforms with contractors, but they're not niched, and you're on your own. Upwork and Fiverr and 99designs and all of these platforms are brilliant, but when you're trying to find someone to help you, you'd have to figure out the whole industry to know how to best work with those people. You'd have to become an expert to know how to really leverage them and choose your team that way.

So what we're doing is introducing the concept of organizing this industry, niching. The Commetta collective represents contractors who are aligned in our values, our ethics, our professionalism. We come under a brand that speaks to that and for that, and we practice it really with each other most, I'd say. But we're also aligned under this product line that I developed, which fits in those categories that I mentioned. So it helps organize online marketing a bit, and it then helps you as a contractor to learn what you're actually doing and how you could sell it, with what inclusions and what pricing. So on a lot of levels, there are a lot of paradigm shifts represented where I'm playing.

Well, our purpose, the mission, is summarized as diluting the media with positive, true content, and diluting the economy with conscious social businesses and offerings, in order to equalize the opportunities here. Under this mission is a goal of equality, specifically equality in opportunity.

If we all knew how our barter system works, if we all learned this in school: every profession that you're learning or could choose has an industry behind it. Everything is a business. Every single official organization, every group of people, is one form of business or another. Our governments, our schools, our hospitals, they're all businesses. If people knew that, and if they knew how business worked, I think we'd make different decisions. And I think we'd also see, if everyone had that knowledge, that it would be a question of the cream rising to the top, and not privilege, or our past, determining who is successful or why they're the way they are.

So at the core of this, and maybe that also comes from the experience of being a woman, and particularly a woman in business, there's a really big theme of equality and equal opportunity. So we use education in this whole work that we're doing. Yes, we offer it as an agency, but we also coach and train. At the core of the mission and the purpose is really to make marketing education accessible, to make marketing, for lack of a better word, more democratic. So that ideally, if everyone had this knowledge while they were learning about what they wanted to specialize in, we'd see a different economy. Our barter system would probably balance out differently. So that speaks to the purpose of what I'm doing.

And then the importance of purpose in general. I think it's tied to health: if you look at some of the longevity studies of the people who live the healthiest or the happiest, they're in community and they have meaning and purpose. Maybe this brings up more of the yoga side of our conversation. The word that came up strongly for me when you were asking is energy, energy alignment.

You can talk about purpose. Yes, there's knowing your why as a marketing piece, I get that. But when you are aligned with your true purpose, when there is deep meaning in what you're doing, when you feel connected to what you're here for and the opportunity you have in that moment, and all of those things are aligned, your energy and intention and attention, and a bigger picture that's meaningful for you, I think that's actually when impact can happen. That's actually when change happens.

And being able to change feels like a superpower. Life is change, but somehow we're all change averse and resistant. However, when you align with a purpose and are able to surrender to something that is bigger than you, this energy shows up to allow you to connect to it, guide you through it and bring you along it. And it takes you far beyond anything you could ever do from your own mind, thinking that that's your purpose.

I think we're seeing it right now, in the fact that we just learned what's essential for us. And now, as we go further into this crisis, we're also learning about how we've been treating the people who are essential. I think the truth always wants to come out, and we're at a moment where a lot of truths are coming to the surface. This is a revealing time. It's also a transformative time.

Business and the economy and the barter system are not inherently bad. They're actually brilliant, if you think about it: a barter system that can connect all of us and make sure we all have shelter or food enough to be alive right now. I'm not speaking to the quality of all of our lives, but the fact that we're all here with enough to be here, and somehow finding our way to trade in that system, is fascinating. It's brilliant, and it's not inherently disproportionate as a concept.

So it really comes back to that word human. At the end of the day, we've been focused on numbers, or reach. Whether it's marketing numbers or dollars, behind all of that are human beings, and the quality of their life, and how we treat each other. And I would even extend it to how we treat our animals: how are we treating the living beings on this planet in this economy? How does the economy allow for the quality of our lives? When we match business to being something healthy, which actually gives quality to all of life, I think business is the way, honestly. It is the system we have in place between us. It's what connects us. It literally is the web of our society. It's a beautiful thing. It just needs to have a lot of truth come out, and a lot of recalibration.

And I think the way to get there, at least from what I've seen in the mission I'm tapped into, is by educating and being a part of revealing the truth about how it works. That's what we're committed to as the Commetta collective. We want everyone to know how to trade, how to communicate what they have available to trade. And once they know how to do that, they'll probably make different choices about the businesses around them, once they understand that those are businesses. And they'll have different opportunities and be able to do more with their own time and purpose, because they won't be blocked by not knowing how to go about it.

Yeah. It's not that money is a bad thing at all, and I've always had to reinforce that too. When I started teaching, a long, long time ago, people would get angry when they found out how it actually works, and fair enough, of course. But it's not that business is a bad word, and it's not that money is a bad word. I wish everyone abundance, especially if they're in a place where they're driven by more than just that. I hope that you'd have it in order to achieve those goals.

It's the medium of exchange in our barter system. It's not the point of exchange. It's not what we're actually exchanging. At the end of the day, that's not what we're here to deliver, serve or do. It's just the medium. It helps us organize the barter system times 7 billion plus people. It's fascinating as a system. We just haven't gotten to the rest of the story. It literally is just the way to get there, but not where we're going.

I was driven by the goal of educating as a way to equalize the opportunity in our economy. When I started educating at the beginning of this, people were all for it after they got over being angry about it, but then they had nowhere to go. So I had to develop a company that could actually help them in an affordable, accessible way before I could really turn on the education engine.

So personally, my goal in my lifetime is to make marketing, and therefore economy and exchange system, education universal. Again, I think if we're all educated, then we'll see different results. So making communication and exchange, marketing in our times, online marketing knowledge, literally something that's a part of every program, something that's in every school. That's one of my goals that I'm still working towards, and it's feeling closer than ever. Equaling the opportunities in business is at the core of it. And I think that also represents shifting a corporate culture.

I'm also involved in a movement called Fuckup Nights, which is a very provocative brand that came out of Mexico. It comes down to events, now happening in over 315 cities around the world, of entrepreneurs and professionals sharing failure stories. And that's fun. That's the acronym, and it is fun. But what it represents is also an actual paradigm shift in corporate culture, to bring us towards more empathy, more transparency, more vulnerability. Again: we're humans, and this isn't easy, and life is change, so it's not always on the up curve, and it's not always great.

It points to the work of Dr. Carol Dweck in the US on the growth mindset. Everything is happening on this kind of curve. If you stop at the down point and focus there, yeah, it's going to feel like a failure, and it might be, if that's where you cut off. But if you keep going, it inevitably will just go up and down again.

And if I were to share one of the diagrams from my business training that comes back all the time, it's the concept of the product life cycle. That touches on change as well. If you make a product, let's use gas cars, the product life cycle will inevitably go up and then it will go down. And the goal isn't to ride it until every drop of oil is out of our planet and it has completely decomposed. The goal of business, which is a profession that we should all learn and honor, would be to reinvent based on demand, using business as a force to solve problems, to meet needs and demand. So you would want to launch that more sustainable energy solution, and then improve it and improve it, so that as a business, you ride the steady wave through the process of reinvention, finding that union, that yoga, that steady point, that common point in change.

So I guess that's part of what I'd like to educate in my lifetime here, and I hope that serves.

Thank you.